3 Strategies to Maximize Conversions, Now.

Is Your Site or App a Leaky Bucket? Plug the Holes and Convert More of the Traffic You’re Already Getting. Use These 3 Strategies to Maximize Conversions, Now.

Friction is a conversion killer.

It’s never been harder to satisfy and convert digital consumers. They’re more informed, more connected, and more impatient. And more selective with their discretionary dollars.

But when consumers encounter friction on your website or mobile app, they not only become frustrated, they often fail to convert.

This is the all-too-common leaky bucket syndrome.

The loss of conversions, revenue, customer trust, and loyalty due to friction is astronomical.

In fact, we uncovered more than $2.7 billion in revenue opportunity last year for leading global brands by quantifying hidden friction.

So before spending even more dollars to drive traffic, only for it to slip away, here are 3 strategies to seal the leaks, maximize conversions, and improve the user experience.

Here are some examples of friction causing sites and apps to lose conversions:

⁄ Slow pages

⁄ Broken links

⁄ Shifting content

⁄ Errors and crashes

⁄ Confusing navigation

⁄ Cumbersome checkout

Target the right metrics that correlate to revenue impact.

You don’t improve what you don’t measure.

But with hundreds of site performance metrics and business KPIs in the data universe, how do you know which ones to focus on?

We recommend using Onload as a core benchmark for understanding customer friction.

Pro Tip: As a starting point for any Continuous Experience Optimization improvement, calculate Optimal Page Speed, or the ideal Onload time for a page to achieve the best return in revenue.

An ongoing analysis of millions of user sessions across hundreds of websites shows faster Onload can contribute to higher conversion rates and revenue.

For example, one of the largest U.S. online retailers discovered hidden, conversion-killing friction was costing them nearly half a billion dollars annually.

Another vital metric to focus on is Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), a Google Core Web Vital objectively measuring perceived load speed.

Pro Tip: Google Lighthouse is a free tool you can use to test and measure Core Web Vitals. But, Real User Monitoring data can provide you with even more actionable insights to improve these metrics for better results.

In one study, conversion rates were 40% to 50% lower for users who experienced a 4 to 5-second LCP versus a 2-second LCP.

However, since every website’s conversion improvement outcomes are unique, ask your analytics team to provide the conversion rate curves for your critical pages.

Analyzing your conversion rate curves will help you understand how site experience impacts conversions so you can prioritize improving the pages with the greatest opportunity to maximize conversions.

HACK #2 Experience the Journey.

There are so many touchpoints along the customer journey.

And if visitors experience friction at any point, they could fail to convert and instead go to a competitor.

Pro Tip: Ideally, your top pages should be pinged with synthetic measurements every 5 minutes to detect issues. And if you’ve identified specific customer paths, you can create multi-step, real browser monitors that will drive synthetic traffic along those journeys. These scripts should run at least every 30 minutes, or faster.

This will lead to an unbelievable amount of missed revenue. We’ve seen that on average, a brand can lose nearly $20 million annually due to friction.

We recommend experiencing your customers’ journey first-hand to feel their joy and experience their pain.

How?

And a less technical strategy?

Step into your customer’s shoes and navigate your live website or mobile app through their perspective. This will give you invaluable insights that traditional analytics and testing alone can’t provide.

First, identify your most critical pages. You could use customer journey and page volume analytics to determine what those are.

Next, pick out your top converting and non-converting paths and run synthetic scripting along each of them. For the technical folks, this would mean creating a Selenium Script.

By understanding the customer journey, you can uncover opportunities to recover lost revenue and conversions.

It’s no secret that different stakeholders in your business have different priorities. So, how do you bring them all together to rally behind the user experience?

Change the conversation around experience and performance to focus on how much friction is costing you in conversions, revenue, trust and loyalty.

And then, how you can continuously optimize the customer experience to achieve those outcomes.

A good starting point is tag governance.

Much like how nobody owns resolving friction in the customer journey (because everyone does), the same can be true about tag governance.

Every team can add, remove, or change tags, which can introduce unintended friction to the journey.

But siloed and often using different tools, they may be unaware of the cause of friction and its impact on revenue and conversions.

Pro Tip: One of the most important success criteria for optimizing tag governance is having buy-in across every level and department in your company with a vested interest in the customer experience.

So, we recommend creating a Tag Governance Committee with diverse representation across your company, from:

⁄ Engineering

⁄ Product/eCommerce

⁄ Marketing/Advertising

⁄ Digital Analytics/Tag Management

Creating a Tag Governance Committee can empower your organization to extract as much value as possible from every experience optimization project to maximize conversions and the user experience.

Each representative or Tag Governance Champion should meet regularly to gain alignment on all tags and prevent them from causing conversion-killing friction.

If You Only Remember One Thing

To convert more of your existing traffic, you must first quantify the friction in your customers’ digital experience. Then, by knowing the cost of friction, you can resolve the most impactful ones in their journey and plug the leaks to convert more users into loyal customers.

Want to see how we can help you convert more of your traffic?

Blue Triangle is the only platform that starts with quantifying conversion and revenue loss due to hidden friction in the customer journey and ends with proving ROI after resolving friction.